I’m back. If you are wondering why my blog has been a little stale over the past week or so it is because after Fall Symposium in Orlando I took a week off and then this week I have been traveling.

One of my travels was presenting on enterprise mashups at the The Council of Information Services Directors (CISD), conference in Baton Rouge, LA. It was attended by about 800 IT leaders in state and local government (including education). After my presentation a gentleman approached me and after telling me how much he enjoyed my presentation he said, “I’ve been in IT now for about 25 years and frankly I was getting bored with it until mashups.” He is on the higher education side and had an interesting idea.

In my pitch I talk about the movie Minority Report (required viewing for mashup enthusiasts) and a scene with Tom Cruise in particular as a great example of the nirvana of mashups where your power users build their own applications as fast as the situation changes.

His idea, which he is very excited about, is turning the classroom into a very dynamic learning environment where the teacher can respond quickly and flexibly to students by tapping into a rich repository of learning “gadgets” (that are relevant to the class and the syllabus) to build a classroom experience that changes as fast as the students inquisitive minds. He wants to turn the teachers of Louisiana into the higher education equivalent of Tom Cruise in Minority report.

I love it and I’m very happy that a presentation of mine can spark this type of innovative thinking.

Anthony J. Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research responsible for the research content that Gartner publishes through its three internet businesses (softwareadvice.com, capterra.com and getapp.com).
These responsibilities include creating and leading the research organization and infrastructure needed for the strategy formulation, planning, research, creation, editing, production and distribution of the content. He has four global teams of highly talented people who are advancing towards the world's greatest destination for content on how small businesses succeed through information technology.

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